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Beto O’Rourke’s Self-Destructing CampaignBy Brian Cates
If you’ve been following the various high-profile Senate and House races being contested in the midterm elections that are being held on Nov. 6, then James O’Keefe is a name you’ll be quite familiar with.
O’Keefe is the founder and lead investigative reporter of Project Veritas, which specializes in hidden-camera videos that expose corruption. In a series of bombshell reports released in recent weeks, undercover journalists working for Project Veritas have shown Democrats running for office and their top campaign staffers confessing to all manner of political malfeasance.
In just the past three weeks, Democratic candidates for office such as Tennessee Senate candidate Phil Bredesen, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, Arizona Senate candidate Krysten Sinema, Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, and Virginia House candidate Abigail Spanberger, were the focus of highly damaging videos released by undercover Project Veritas journalists who were embedded within their campaigns.
The videos show campaign staffers—and, sometimes, the candidates themselves—lying about their true beliefs on key issues, openly discussing how they have to obscure their progressive views, in order to trick voters into supporting them.
And with its latest video exposé, Project Veritas has uncovered potentially illegal activity, in addition to the usual politically motivated lies. On the night of Nov. 1, O’Keefe posted a new video made by one of his undercover reporters that allegedly showed top staff members of the O’Rourke campaign discussing the use of donated campaign funds to aid recently arrived illegal migrants from Honduras, and hiding that revelation from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by claiming the money went to fund campaign Halloween events and other expenses.
Despite what one O’Rourke campaign staffer alleges in this latest hidden camera video, there are very strict laws about this kind of thing. Fundraising for one purpose and then spending the money on something else is the same sort of thing that got televangelist Jim Bakker sent to prison.
Political campaigns make heavy use of fundraising via television commercials, radio ads, and other media. When an appeal is made to the public to send in donations, that donated money must be spent on what was promised. For any organization, whether a ministry or a political campaign, to take its donors’ money and use it for some other purpose, while actively hiding the bait-and-switch from its donors, raises a whole host of legal and ethical issues.
O’Rourke has responded to the Project Veritas video by saying this was money donated to charity and he’s going to make sure all relevant laws and disclosure forms are filled out accurately.
Long-Term Planning
Let me say here, having viewed all of the Project Veritas videos made inside the Bredesen, Heitkamp, McCaskill, Gillum, and now O’Rourke campaigns, that I am stunned at the level of preparation they reveal.
While much of the media has focused on the videos themselves, and what the candidates and their staff are caught revealing on them, what intrigues me most of all is how carefully these video stings must have been set up.
Nobody is going to make the kind of casual confessions you see being constantly made in these videos to some campaign staffer they barely know, who just joined the team a few weeks ago. That tells me the undercover reporters doing this hidden camera filming were embedded with these campaigns months ago. These aren’t people who just showed up at the campaign office to volunteer in September or early October. This took planning over a long time.
In particular, with the O’Rourke video, there’s no way these campaign staffers are talking to someone they didn’t completely trust about cooking the books to hide what they were planning to do with donated campaign funds.
While the other videos are just politically embarrassing exposés—”Yeah, our candidate is super-duper liberal and we have to hide this from the voters and lie to them!” and so on—the O’Rourke tape is very different. These staffers are discussing potential campaign-finance fraud. Somebody really, really got “in there” and was so completely embedded and trusted that the campaign staff felt completely comfortable discussing what could be illegal activity in front of them.
If I was in a top Democrat’s campaign right now, I’d be looking around very carefully and wondering who I can really trust and who might be a Project Veritas undercover journalist surreptitiously gathering evidence for a new report.
I can only wonder—given the pace of his video releases over the past three weeks—what else O’Keefe and Project Veritas might be dropping in the next few days.
Brian Cates is a political pundit and writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/beto-orourkes-campaign-self-destructs_2707...
(Parts 1 & 2)
10/22/18 from Truthdig / Axis of Logic (under Fair Use; Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107)
"American History for Truthdiggers: Original Sin"
By Maj. Danny Sjursen:
(Truthdig editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “Make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?
The “American History for Truthdiggers” series, which begins with the installment below, is a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His wartime experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.)
PART ONE
American Slavery, American Freedom (Colonial Virginia 1607-1676)
Origins matter. Every nation-state has an origin myth, a comforting tale of trials, tribulations and triumphs that form the foundation of “imagined communities.” The United States of America—a self-proclaimed “indispensable nation”—is as prone to exaggerated origin myths as any society in human history. Most of us are familiar with the popular American origin story: Our forefathers, a collection of hardy, pious pioneers, escaped religious persecution in England and founded a “new world”—a shining beacon in a virgin land. Of course, that story, however flawed, refers to the Pilgrims, and Massachusetts, circa 1620. But that’s not the true starting point for English-speaking society in North America.
The first permanent colony was in Virginia, at Jamestown, beginning in 1607. Why, then, do our young students dress in black buckle-top hats and re-create Thanksgiving each year? Where is the commemoration of Jamestown and our earliest American forebears? The omission itself tells a story, that of a chosen, comforting narrative (the legend of the Pilgrims), and the whitewashing of a murkier past along the James River.
The truth is, the United States descends from both origins—Massachusetts and Virginia—and carries the legacy of each into the 21st century. So why do we focus on the Pilgrims and sideline Virginia? A fresh look may help explain.
The Age of ‘Discovery’
When it comes to history—like any story—the starting point is itself informative. I taught freshman history at West Point, a far more progressive and thoughtful school than many readers probably imagine. Nonetheless, with cadets required to take only one semester of U.S. history, we had just 40 lessons to illuminate the American past. So where to start? The official answer—as in so many standard history courses—was Jamestown, Virginia, 1607.
That, of course, is a fascinating, perhaps absurd, choice. Such a starting point omits several thousand years of Native American history, of varied, complex civilizations from modern Canada to Chile. Time being short and all, 1607 remains a common pedagogical starting point. As a result, from the beginning, our understanding of U.S. history is Eurocentric and narrow (covering only the last 400 or so years). Consider that Problem No. 1.
Next, contemplate the language we use to describe the “founding” of new European colonies. This is, say it with me, the “Age of Discovery.” In 1492, Columbus discovered (even though he wasn't first) America. Now, that’s a loaded term. Isn't it just as accurate to say that Native Americans discovered Columbus—a lost and confused soul—when he landed upon their shores?
When we say Europeans discovered the “New World,” we’re—not inadvertently—implying that there was nothing substantial going on in the Americas until the Caucasians showed up. Europe has a dated, chronological history, reaching back at least to the Greeks, which most students learn in elementary school and later on in Western Civilization classes. Not so for the Native Americans. Their public history starts in 1492, or, for Americans, in 1607. What came before, then, hardly matters.
Inauspicious Beginnings
Englishmen came neither to escape religious persecution nor to found a New Jerusalem. Not to Virginia, at least. No, the corporate-backed expedition—by the Virginia Joint Stock Company—sought treasure (think gold), to find a northwest passage to India, and balance the rival Catholic Spaniards. But, first and foremost, they pursued profit.
The expedition barely survived. That should come as little surprise. They chose a malarial swamp for a home. The first ships carried mostly aristocrats—“gentlemen,” as they were then labeled—with a few laborers and carpenters for good measure. Gentlemen didn't work or deal with the dirty business of farming and settling. But they did like to argue—and there were too many “chiefs” on this voyage. The first party did not include any farmers or women. Only 30 percent survived the first winter. Two years later, only 60 out of 500 colonists survived the “Starving Time.” Over the first 17 years, 6,000 people arrived, but only 1,200 were alive in 1624. One guy ate his wife.
So why the disaster? Why the poor site selection and early starvation? First off, the colonists chose a site inland on the James River because they feared detection by the more powerful Spanish. But mainly the disaster came down to colonial motivations. Jamestown was initially about profit, not settlement. Corporate dividends, not community. This was the private sector, not a permanent national venture. In that sense, matters in early Virginia were not unlike modern American economics.
Saved by Tobacco, the First Drug Economy
They never did find much gold, or, for that matter, a northwest passage. Then again, they didn't all starve to death. Rather, the venture was saved by a different sort of “gold”—the cash crop of tobacco. Tobacco changed the entire dynamic of colonization and control in North America. Finally, there was money to be made. The Englishmen shipped the newest vice eastward and pulled a handsome profit in return. Our beloved forefathers were early drug dealers. More migrants now crossed the Atlantic to get in on the tobacco windfall.
The plentiful “gentlemen” of Virginia sought to re-create their landed estates in England. Despite significant early conflict with the native Powhatan Confederacy, large tobacco plantations eventually developed along the coast. Who, though, would work these fields? Certainly not the landowners. The burgeoning aristocracy had two choices: lower-class English or Scots-Irish indentured servants (who worked for a fixed period in the promise of future acres) and African slaves. Whom to choose? Unsurprisingly, ethics played little role, and cost was the defining factor.
When mortality was high in the colony’s early years, plantation owners favored the cheaper indentured (mainly white) servants. But as more families planted corn, kept cattle and improved nutrition, death rates fell and slaves became more appealing. After all, though expensive in upfront costs, slaves worked for life, and the slave owners got to keep their offspring. Nevertheless, for the first several decades, an interracial mix of slaves and servants worked the land in Virginia.
Bacon’s Rebellion and the American Future
The problem with the tobacco economy was one of space. To be profitable, cash crops require expansive acreage, and in Virginia this meant movement inland. This expansion set the Englishmen on a collision course with local Native Americans. Furthermore, what was plantation society to do about those indentured servants who survived and matriculated? Land would have to be found somewhere. (Though not near the coasts and early settlements. The “gentlemen” weren't about to divide up their own large estates.) In order to maintain their chosen societal model—landed aristocracy—in which the wealthiest 10 percent possessed half the wealth and the bottom 60 percent held less than 10 percent of accumulated wealth, new land would have to be found further west—in “Indian territory.”
Thing is, after some bloody, early wars with the Powhatan, most “gentlemen” preferred a stable, secure status quo. (Not another war. That’d be bad for business.) However, falling tobacco prices, increased competition from nearby colonies and the relentless search by the former indentured class for more land brought frontier Virginians into conflict with an easy scapegoat: nearby Native Americans. Frustrated lower-class men—both white and black—rallied behind a young, discontented aristocrat, a firebrand named Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon led his interracial poor-people’s army in attacks on local Natives and, eventually, on Gov. William Berkeley and the establishment “gentlemen.” In 1675 and 1676, Bacon’s throng destroyed plantations and even burned Jamestown before Bacon died of disease (the “bloody fluxe”) and the rebellion petered out.
Bacon’s Rebellion was one of the foundational—and most misunderstood—events in American history. Here, a populist army savagely assaulted hated Native Americans and aristocrats alike. A mix of black and white former indentured servants demonstrated the fragility of Virginian society. The planter class was terrified. In order to avoid a repeat at all costs, the landed gentry made a devil’s bargain. To ensure stability, they realized they must co-opt some of the poor without ceding their own privileged status.
Enter America’s original sins: racism and white privilege. Plantation owners simply hired fewer indentured servants and became more reliant on (black) African chattel slaves for their labor force. The planters also threw a bone to the middling whites, lowering some taxes and allowing more political representation for white male Virginians.
The implications were as disturbing as they were enduring. White unity became the organizing principle of life in colonial Virginia. To be fair, poor whites lived difficult lives and always outnumbered their aristocratic betters. Nonetheless, these lower-class Caucasians benefited from the new, racialized social system. Pale skin became a badge of honor—life may not be optimal, but “at least we are white.” Black freemen became a thing of the past, and soon “blackness” became inseparably associated with slavery and the lowest of social classes. Black skin became a brand of slavery, and runaways could no longer blend into colonial society. Slaves were easily spotted by virtue of their color.
Bacon’s Rebellion linked land, labor and race together in nefarious ways. Land (ownership) remained the path to freedom. Labor remained essential to profiting from the land, and race came to define the relationship between land and labor. After 1676, a class-based system morphed into a race-based system of labor and social structure. The demand for African slaves rose and a triangular trade developed among North America, Africa and Europe. It seemed everyone benefited from slave labor—it became an Atlantic system. The American South had transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society. It would remain so for nearly two centuries. Race became a prevalent fact of life in the Americas—and still is, 342 years later.
There’s nothing simple about America’s origins, and it is well that this is so. In that way, the United States is like most other modern nation-states. Leaving behind exceptionalist rhetoric and exploring uncomfortable truths signify intellectual maturity. Should this country wish to move forward, be its best self and fulfill the dream of its finest rhetoric, then the citizenry must dispense with reassuring myths and grapple with inconvenient truths.
What, then, do Jamestown and early Virginia have to tell us in 2018? Perhaps this: American slavery arose alongside and intertwined with American freedom. Our society descends from a sinister original sin: the development of a race-based caste system along the banks of the James River. Race, class, labor and slavery were inextricably linked in our colonial past. They remain so today.
PART TWO
It is the image Americans are comfortable with. The first Thanksgiving. Struggling Pilgrims—our blessed forebears—saved by the generosity of kindly Native Americans. Two societies coexisting in harmony. If Colonial Virginia was a mess, well, certainly matters were better in Massachusetts. Here are origins all can be proud of.
Our children re-create the scene every November, and we watch them with pride through the lenses of our smartphones. But is this representation of life in Colonial New England an accurate portrait of Anglo-Native relations at Plymouth, or, for that matter, in the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony? Of course it isn't, but nonetheless the impression—the myth—persists. That’s a story unto itself.
Consider this: How many Americans even know there was a difference between Pilgrims and Puritans? The distinctions matter. The Pilgrims, of course, arrived first. Calvinists of humble origins, the Pilgrims were Protestant separatists who believed the mainstream Church of England was beyond saving. They fled England for the Netherlands in the early 17th century, and then, in 1620, about a hundred boarded the Mayflower to go to North America. It was they who landed on Plymouth Rock.
The far more numerous Puritans were also pious, dissenting Protestants, but they initially believed the Church of England could be reformed from within. They were generally wealthier, more prominent citizens. In about 1630, about 1,000 Puritans formed the first wave to settle the area claimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were, indeed, fleeing the persecution of King Charles I, but—unlike the Pilgrims—they received a royal charter for their colony. They hoped to found a “New Jerusalem” in the New World.
Stark Contrasts: Virginia vs. New England
These weren't the gold-hungry aristocrats of Colonial Virginia. The Puritans (and Pilgrims) came as families—they included women. The Massachusetts climate and natural population growth made for far lower mortality than that experienced at early Jamestown in Virginia. Everyone was willing to work, and the productive family units made, eventually, for bountiful harvests. This was not a land of “gentlemen” and cash crops, as in Virginia, but of dutiful families tilling the land.
The motivations and origins of the two English colonies affected the social structure of each. Differing goals set the tone from the first. Virginians sought to exploit the land, mine its resources, compete with the Spanish and turn a quick profit. Not so the Puritans. They strove to settle, to put down roots and thrive in an idealized community. Their middling origins combined with communal goals and resulted in familial plots with widespread land ownership—another contrast with the tobacco plantations of Jamestown. All this translated into a rough economic equality, at least in the early years. There was also a near total absence of chattel slavery: The climate didn't support the most common cash crops, and so there was little incentive to import Africans to New England.
God Wills It: The Motivations of the Puritans
It all sounds harmonious, idyllic even. Yet something lurked below the surface, something dark and unpleasant to modern eyes. These were fundamentalist zealots! These insufferable, millenarian Calvinists held themselves in shockingly high esteem. They were chosen, they would transform the world by their example. If the Pilgrims sought separation from a world of sin, the Puritans meant to create a New World, an example for all to emulate. It briefs well, and makes for an agreeable origin narrative, but isn't there something disturbing about such a people, about such overbearing confidence?
Ponder the words of John Winthrop, an early governor of the Bay Colony:
"… wee shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New England: for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. …"
These were people on a mission, the Lord’s mission, come what may. Such people would seem to be on a collision course with the region’s natives and Anglo nonconformists. And this would soon come to pass.
The Puritans’ motivations and goals raise some salient questions. What does it say about, and what are the implications for, a society founded on such colossal self-regard? Is it, ultimately, a good thing? That’s certainly a matter of opinion, but the questions themselves are instructive. Americans must make such queries to get an honest sense of themselves and their origins. This much is hard to argue with: Here, in Massachusetts, we find the geneses of American exceptionalism—the blessing and curse that has shadowed the United States for more than three centuries, driving domestic and especially foreign policy. Divergent modern political figures, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, stuck carefully to an American exceptionalist script, in rhetoric if not in deed. One wonders whether this “City on a Hill” milieu, on the whole, has been a positive attribute. This author, at least, tends to doubt it. Perhaps we should mistrust such pride, and conceit, in even its most American forms.
Stifling Dissent: Life in Colonial New England
Could you imagine living with these people, comporting with their way of life? It sounds like a nightmare. Yet we Americans hold these antecedents in high esteem. Perhaps it’s natural, but this much is certain: Such veneration requires a certain degree of willful forgetting, a whitewashing of inconvenient truths about Puritan society.
Sure, Massachusetts avoided the worst famines of Jamestown’s early years, but life in Colonial New England was far from serene. It rarely is in repressive religious societies. Remember, the Puritans constructed exactly what they said they would, a theocracy on the bay. The Massachusetts Bay Colony may indeed have more in common with modern Saudi Arabia—executing “witches” and “sorcerers”—than it does with contemporary Boston. Our ancestors were far more religious than most Americans can fathom. But there’s also a problem of framing; we’ve omitted the uncomfortable bits to fashion an uplifting origin narrative.
There were many subgroups that certainly didn’t enjoy life in early Colonial Massachusetts: religious dissidents, agnostics, free thinkers and, well, assertive women. We’ve all heard of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, but nearly four decades earlier the widow Ann Higgins was executed, hung for witchcraft, after having the audacity to complain that hired carpenters had overcharged her for a remodeling job on her house.
All told, 344 citizens were accused of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts. Twenty were executed. The accused had commonalities that are indicative of the nature of gender relations in the Bay Colony. Seventy-five percent were women. Most of those women were middle-aged or older and demonstrated some degree of independence. Many were suspected of some sort of sexual impropriety. The point is that Colonial New England was inhabited by zealots—conformist and oppressive fundamentalists who strictly policed the boundaries of their exalted theocracy. Forget the Thanksgiving feast: This was Islamic State on the Atlantic!
If life was as idyllic as the settlers intended in hail-the-Protestant-work-ethic Massachusetts Bay, then why were so many colonial “heroes” kicked out? Roger Williams, for example, founder of Rhode Island, promoted religious toleration and some separation of church and state, and asserted (gasp) that settlers ought to buy land from the native inhabitants. His thanks? A ticket straight out of Massachusetts. Slightly less well known was Anne Hutchinson. She had the gall to organize weekly women’s meetings to discuss theology and even contemplated the concept of individual intuition as a path to salvation. She too was banished. There was simply no room for dissent in Puritan society.
‘We Must Burn Them’: Puritan and Native Relations
This, naturally, brings us to the native peoples of New England. If nonconformist Englishmen fared so poorly in Massachusetts, then what of the Indians? You can probably guess.
Once again, as in Virginia, the Native Americans did not, or could not, wipe out the nascent colonial community, even though, initially at least, there were fewer soldiers among the settlers in Massachusetts. The explanation for the settlers surviving among the native Americans is far more complex than the simple myth of the noble, benevolent savage. The Puritans were the “beneficiaries of catastrophe,” for New England native communities had recently been ravaged by infectious European diseases that spread up and down the coastline. The thinned-out native populations thus posed less of a demographic threat to Massachusetts.
Far from the serene images of Thanksgiving amity, Anglo-Indian relations quickly turned from bad to worse. Land was a factor, but not the only one. A permanent settler community such as the Puritans’ would require inevitable expansion and rapidly grow, to be sure. As in Virginia, land ownership cohered with “freedom”—Anglo land and Anglo freedom, that is. Still, in New England, ideology was as much of a stimulus for war as land, wealth or further economic motives. The native tribes, swarthy and “unbelieving” Pequot, Wampanoag, Naggaransetts and others, simply did not fit into the Puritan’s messianic worldview. Conquered or converted were the only acceptable states for local Indians.
Early colonial wars in Massachusetts were as brutal and bloody as wars anywhere else on the North American continent. Here there was a direct connection between the Puritan religion and the cruelty seen in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. In the Pequot War, Massachusetts militiamen attacked a native fort at Mystic, Connecticut, and through fire and fury burned alive 400 to 700 Indians, mostly women and children. The survivors were sold as slaves.
The militia relied on allied native scouts. Observing the ruthlessness of the Puritan fighting men, one native auxiliary asked Capt. John Underhill, “Why should you be so furious? Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?” Underhill’s reply was as instructive as it is disturbing:
"I would refer you to David where, when a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin against God and man … sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents; some-time the case alters: but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceeding."
Should, from time to time, a tinge of doubt betray the Puritans’ devout certainty, faithful zeal quickly assuaged the guilty conscience. Consider the words of another participant in the “Mystic Massacre,” William Bradford: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire … and horrible was the stink … but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”
Nearly simultaneous to the Virginian Bacon’s Rebellion, the Puritans fought King Philip’s—or Metacom’s—War in Massachusetts. Mercilessly executed on both sides, this was a war of survival that forever broke native power and independence in New England. Nearly one in 50 colonists were killed in what was by far the bloodiest war in American history, with 11 times the death rate of World War II. The native leader Metacom, known to the settlers as King Philip, was betrayed by an informer and killed, and his head was displayed on a pole in Plymouth, Mass., for decades. Such was the savagery of colonial war that the tactics and symbolism bring to mind Islamic State in today’s Syrian civil war.
When it came to Native American affairs, the Puritans hardly set the “City on a Hill” example. Or did they? After all, John Winthrop believed the “God of Israel”—a jealous, smiting deity if ever there was one—was among the Puritans, guiding their every move. As noted here earlier, Winthrop claimed this God provided the colonists such strength that 10 of their number could “resist a thousand enemies.” Viciousness and intolerance toward racially distinct, heathen natives were actually at the heart of “City on a Hill” teleology from the start. What Americans now decry in the Greater Middle East is but an echo of their colonial past. That much is worth remembering.
Not So Different: What Virginians and New Englanders Shared
When considering the two origin-societies of Virginia and Massachusetts, the differences are stark and effortlessly leap forth. More difficult, but just as relevant, are their significant commonalities. For it is in the overlap that we find our shared heritage, that which is universal in the American past, and, perhaps, the past of all settler-colonial societies.
Anglo dominance—and arrogance—acutely pervaded both colonial civilizations. In Massachusetts, as in Virginia, conflict and brutality toward the native peoples were regular features of settler life. In each setting, though to differing extents, a fever for land combined with exceptionalist ideology to conquer slave and native alike. For Englishmen, property ownership corresponded with liberty, but all along the Eastern Seaboard, Anglo liberty portended native death and displacement.
If Colonial Virginian society was fundamentally based on white unity at the expense of African slaves, then perhaps Puritan Massachusetts was founded upon Anglo zealotry at the expense of a “savage” Indian “other.” As proud descendants—some of us literally, most figuratively—of these twin settler-colonial enterprises, Americans must grapple with their inconvenient past. Here there’s much work left to be done.
The exceptionalism and chauvinistic Protestantism of the Massachusetts Puritans long influenced the American experiment. From the “City on a Hill” it is but a short journey to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of a continent—native inhabitants be damned!
Again, origins, and origin stories, matter. They inform who we were, and who we are, in stark contrast to who we’d like to think we were and are. America is its best self when it searches its soul and reforms from within. When, that is, it confronts its demons and seeks a better, more inclusive and empathetic future.
ttp://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_81676.shtml
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/jacobin-fueling-lies-syria/
Opening Statement by Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC
48th Session of the IPCC, Incheon, Korea, 1 October 2018
"It’s a great honour to welcome you to my home country, Korea, and I am very grateful to the government of the Republic of Korea and the authorities of the City of Incheon for hosting us here in this beautiful conference centre.
I am particularly honoured, because this will be one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history. We will consider the Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC. That is our main business here this week and I will concentrate on the 1.5 ºC report in these remarks.
Why is this report so keenly awaited?
Scientists have been warning us for years that we can expect to see more extreme weather with climate change. The heat waves, wildfires, and heavy rainfall events of recent months all over the world underscore these warnings.
Three weeks ago in New York, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described climate change as the great challenge of our time. But, he also noted that, thanks to science, we know its size and nature. Science alerts us to the gravity of the situation, but science also, and this special report in particular, helps us understand the solutions available to us.
Distinguished delegates, nearly three years ago your governments adopted the Paris Agreement. It sets a target of holding the rise in global mean temperatures to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 ºC.
At that time, relatively little was known about the risks avoided in a 1.5 ºC world compared with a 2 ºC warmer world, or about the pathway of greenhouse gas emissions compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 ºC. So, as part of the decision adopting the Paris Agreement, governments invited the IPCC to prepare a report assessing the impacts of warming of 1.5 ºC and related emissions pathways.
Governments asked the IPCC to deliver this report in 2018, in time for what has become the Talanoa Dialogue at this year’s Climate Conference, COP24.
To prepare a report on 1.5 ºC to this timeline was extremely ambitious. The IPCC, and through it the scientific community, responded positively and with sincere enthusiasm.
In April 2016, at our 43rd Session, the IPCC decided to prepare the report as part of the work programme for the Sixth Assessment Cycle. The Panel decided to prepare this report in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, thus placing the report firmly among the tools to be used to achieve the sustainable development goals.
We held the scoping meeting in August of that year, and the Panel approved the outline at the 44th Session in October.
In February 2017 the Panel was able to announce the author team of the report – 91 authors and review editors were selected from 40 countries. And less than 20 months later, you have the report for your consideration.
Let me give you some statistics to illustrate the scale of work that has been achieved in this time. The final draft of the report contains over 6,000 cited references. The expert review of the First Order Draft, from July to September 2017, attracted almost 13,000 comments from some 500 experts in 61 countries. The government and expert review of the Second Order Draft, from January to February this year, attracted over 25,000 comments from 570 experts and officials in 71 countries.
Governments provided close to 4,000 comments on the Final Government Draft. So in all we have received 42,000 comments on the drafts of this report. Allow me to remind you that under the IPCC procedures, the authors must address each comment received in the review process.
Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, and we are grateful to the hundreds of experts who have contributed to our work in this way. We thank the 133 Contributing Authors who have added their expertise.
And special thanks to our National Focal Points who played a key role in the nomination of authors and the review process. I would also like to express my profound respect and gratitude to the co-chairs, authors and review editors, and the technical support units, for accomplishing this Herculean task.
This achievement goes beyond numbers.
This Special Report is unique in IPCC history as it has been prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups. Each chapter is a genuine piece of cross-disciplinary work, bringing together all the scientific expertise of the IPCC. That is why the line-by-line consideration of the Summary for Policymakers will be conducted by the First Joint Session of Working Groups I, II and III. In the same way, the Summary for Policymakers that will be considered in detail this week integrates the most important findings of the chapters in each section.
Distinguished delegates, the scientific community has responded to the invitation of policymakers and presented you with a robust and timely report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC and related greenhouse gas emission pathways.
The task is now yours.
You will consider the draft Summary for Policymakers line by line to ensure that it is consistent with the detailed assessment of scientific, technical and socio-economic information provided by the underlying detailed chapters.
Governments have asked the IPCC for an assessment of warming of 1.5 degrees, its impacts and related emissions pathways, to help them address climate change. We will work together in a constructive and collaborative spirit to produce a strong, robust and clear Summary for Policymakers that responds to the invitation of governments three years ago while upholding the scientific integrity of the IPCC.
Lastly I would like to share the important news with you that these sessions will be climate-neutral. We have taken measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where possible and we will be estimating and compensating the remaining ones.
I am also pleased to inform you that the financial position of the IPCC continues to improve. I would like to thank the many governments who have contributed in recent months for their generous and continuing support, and urge all of you to provide us with the means to carry out the tasks you have given us. In this regard I would like to thank the Panel for your financial support for this report – 1.2 million Swiss francs for the various meetings required to prepare and approve it – and for endorsing the outline of the report and the author team.
I would also like to express my gratitude for the in-kind contributions of the countries that hosted the scoping meetings for this report and the four lead author meetings – Switzerland, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Botswana.
Thank you for your trust in the IPCC.
I am pleased to note that we have posted on the PaperSmart system the Code of Conduct for IPCC meetings that was introduced at the first Lead Author Meeting of Working Group I a couple of months ago. I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss this in the Panel soon; it provides a valuable framework to ensure that all of us here have a respectful working environment.
Let me finish by thanking the Government of Korea for its generous support for this meeting. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank our partners for their continued unwavering support – our parent organizations WMO and UN Environment, and the UNFCCC.
With these words I would like to wish you a successful and collegial meeting. Thank you for your attention."
https://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/
IPCC PRESS RELEASE
8 October 2018
Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of .5ºC approved by governments
INCHEON, Republic of Korea, 8 Oct - Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require rapid, farreaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the IPCC said in a new assessment. With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.
The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC was approved by the IPCC on Saturday in Incheon, Republic of Korea. It will be a key scientific input into the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December, when governments review the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.
“With more than 6,000 scientific references cited and the dedicated contribution of thousands of expert and government reviewers worldwide, this important report testifies to the breadth and policy relevance of the IPCC,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC.
Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the IPCC report in response to an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015.
The report’s full name is Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
“One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.
The report highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC, or more. For instance, by 2100, global sea level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C. Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (> 99 percent) would be lost with 2ºC.
“Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5ºC or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems,” saidHans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.
Limiting global warming would also give people and ecosystems more room to adapt and remain below relevant risk thresholds, added Pörtner. The report also examines pathways available to limit warming to 1.5ºC, what it would take to achieve them and what the consequences could be.
“The good news is that some of the kinds of actions that would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5ºC are already underway around the world, but they would need to accelerate,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Co-Chair of Working Group I.
The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.
“Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.
Allowing the global temperature to temporarily exceed or ‘overshoot’ 1.5ºC would mean a greater reliance on techniques that remove CO2 from the air to return global temperature to below 1.5ºC by 2100. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and some may carry significant risks for sustainable development, the report notes.
“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being, making it easier to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” said Priyardarshi Shukla, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.
The decisions we make today are critical in ensuring a safe and sustainable world for everyone, both now and in the future, said Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.
“This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs. The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” she said.
The IPCC is the leading world body for assessing the science related to climate change, its impacts and potential future risks, and possible response options.
The report was prepared under the scientific leadership of all three IPCC working groups. Working Group I assesses the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II addresses impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III deals with the mitigation of climate change.
The Paris Agreement adopted by 195 nations at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in December 2015 included the aim of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change by “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
As part of the decision to adopt the Paris Agreement, the IPCC was invited to produce, in 2018, a Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. The IPCC accepted the invitation, adding that the Special Report would look at these issues in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
Global Warming of 1.5ºC is the first in a series of Special Reports to be produced in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Cycle. Next year the IPCC will release the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and Climate Change and Land, which looks at how climate change affects land use.
The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) presents the key findings of the Special Report, based on the assessment of the available scientific, technical and socio-economic literature relevant to global warming of 1.5°C.
The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC (SR15) is available at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ or www.ipcc.ch.
Key statistics of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC
91 authors from 44 citizenships and 40 countries of residence
- 14 Coordinating Lead Authors (CLAs)
- 60 Lead authors (LAs)
- 17 Review Editors (REs)
133 Contributing authors (CAs)
Over 6,000 cited references
A total of 42,001 expert and government review comments
(First Order Draft 12,895; Second Order Draft 25,476; Final Government Draft: 3,630)
For more information, contact:
IPCC Press Office, Email: ipcc-media@wmo.int
Werani Zabula +41 79 108 3157 or Nina Peeva +41 79 516 7068
(Follow IPCC on Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn and Instagram)
Notes for editors
The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC , known as SR15, is being prepared in response to an invitation from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, when they reached the Paris Agreement, and will inform the Talanoa Dialogue at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24). The Talanoa Dialogue will take stock of the collective efforts of Parties in relation to progress towards the longterm goal of the Paris Agreement, and to inform the preparation of nationally determined contributions. Details of the report, including the approved outline, can be found on the report page. The report was prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups, with support from the Working Group I Technical Support Unit.
What is the IPCC?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. It has 195 member states.
IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency.
The IPCC assesses the thousands of scientific papers published each year to tell policymakers what we know and don't know about the risks related to climate change. The IPCC identifies where there is agreement in the scientific community, where there are differences of opinion, and where further research is needed. It does not conduct its own research.
To produce its reports, the IPCC mobilizes hundreds of scientists. These scientists and officials are drawn from diverse backgrounds. Only a dozen permanent staff work in the IPCC's Secretariat.
The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change. It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals.
IPCC Assessment Reports consist of contributions from each of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. Special Reports undertake an assessment of cross-disciplinary issues that span more than one working group and are shorter and more focused than the main assessments.
Sixth Assessment Cycle
At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015, it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle. At its 43rd Session in April 2016, it decided to produce three Special Reports, a Methodology Report and AR6.
The Methodology Report to refine the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories will be delivered in 2019. Besides Global Warming of 1.5ºC, the IPCC will finalize two further special reports in 2019: the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate and Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. The AR6 Synthesis Report will be finalized in the first half of 2022, following the three working group contributions to AR6 in 2021.
For more information, including links to the IPCC reports, go to: www.ipcc.ch
The Queen says...
Óinseach, the master of inconsequential insinuation, transparent deflection, and sophomoric obfuscation, who supports a deranged racist, sexist, religious bigot, homophobe, war monger, Wall Street patsy, Putin poodle, serial liar, vindictive child, and all around facking eejit, by whom the world's sane people are utterly disgusted.
Don't forget to vote on november 7th...
Investigation Underway Into Alleged Failed Hack By Democratic Party of Georgia
ATLANTA – After an alleged failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system, the Secretary of State’s office opened an investigation into the Democratic Party of Georgia on the evening of Saturday, November 3, 2018. Federal partners, including the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation, were immediately alerted.
Full short article:
https://breaking911.com/investigation-underway-into-alleged-failed-hack-by-democratic-party-of-georgia/
October 29, 2018
"It’s a Right-Wing Cover-Up: Trump Was a Big Inspiration for the Synagogue Slaughter in Pittsburgh.
We can’t let them conceal the motive for the killings, which lead back to Trump."
By Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute:
It’s already started. They’re messaging, texting, tweeting, and even calling into my radio/TV show. Breitbart is even bragging that they got it on CNN.
“This killing in Pittsburgh has nothing to do with Donald Trump. He’s not an anti-Semite; his daughter converted to Judaism and his grandkids are Jews! How can you blame him for the ‘mentally ill’ guy [a phrase used to describe terrorists only when they’re white]?”
But the shooter, by his own words—words that are almost entirely missing from most TV coverage—acted because of what both Trump and Newt Gingrich have said was the main election-year message of Trump and the entire Republican Party: Immigration by people of color.
As the terrorist himself posted on social media just a few hours before he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with an AR-15, he was going to kill members of a congregation that supported the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).
HIAS (whose slogan is “Welcome the stranger; Protect the refugee”) had designated October 19 and 20 of this year as the “National Refugee Shabbat”—and when they did so, the terrorist posted on a right-wing social media site, “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided.”
HIAS was founded in New York in 1881 to help resettle Jewish refugees, but in recent years has moved many of its efforts toward other refugees, including people from Africa, the Americas, and people who practice Islam. As HIAS’s president, Mark Hetfield, told the New York Times, “We used to welcome refugees because they were Jewish. Today HIAS welcomes refugees because we are Jewish.”
Dark skin and “Muslim” are triggers for bigots like the cowardly terrorist and his buddies on social media. In another post, presumably referencing HIAS, he wrote, “Open you [sic] Eyes! It’s the filthy evil jews [sic] Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!”
HIAS used to have a link on its website to the 270 congregations in 32 states that were participating in the work to bring refugees into the United States (and elsewhere), although that link now just points back to their homepage (perhaps because the event is over, or maybe because of the terrorist’s threat).
Noting the terrorist’s pointing out that link to the congregations, which includedTree of Life in Pittsburgh, the Times of Israel reported, “To mark the organization’s personal involvement, at the back of the hall, information on volunteer opportunities in the refugee and immigration committees of participating synagogues and HIAS materials were available for attendees to take home, including a bookmark with the words ‘My People Were Refugees Too.’”
Apparently this festered with the terrorist, because just a few hours before he walked past those brochures and started murdering people at Tree of Life, he posted to a right-wing social media site, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
And in he went, guns blazing.
So, Trump and Gingrich and Fox are giving all-day, all-the-time coverage to a ragtag band of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, who are traveling together on foot for their own mutual safety, lying that there are Arab terrorists and evil gang members among them. This white American terrorist gets increasingly agitated by it all, freaked out that more people of color (or even Muslims!) might be coming to our border to legally apply to asylum, and decides it’s time to take out one of the groups associated with HIAS, who is helping refugees.
It’s a straight line—through Fox and right-wing hate radio—from Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants to the terrorist himself.
Certainly this terrorist had a history of hating Jews; he had repeatedly posted on one of his snowflake “safe places” for haters, “Kill all the Jews!” and “There is no MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.”
But this wasn't entirely an anti-Semitic attack, by the attacker’s own words.
A few days after another white terrorist (“history of mental illness,” said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country’s history—in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America.
And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.
This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism.
This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it’s beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.
We all know how well that turned out for Germany and the world.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/its-right-wing-cover-trump-was-big-inspiration-synagogue-slaughter-pittsburgh
The Thom Hartmann Program - 11/2/18
Uncle Sam even says...
Everybody says...
Young people say...
Old people say...
Trump Creates The Most Amazing Jobs Report In American History
Today’s Campaign Update(Because The Campaign Never Ends)
Sitting here on a Saturday morning wondering when Oprah and Barack are going to go up to Michigan to campaign on behalf of the single most-qualified candidate for the U.S. senate running anywhere in this election. That would be John James, a black man, who is running against the execrable Debbie Stabenow, a white woman.
Ok, silly me – James is a Republican, so he doesn’t qualify as being “black” in the world of Oprah and Barack.
Speaking of America’s Biggest Mistake… – A day after the Oprah campaigned on behalf of Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, Barack Hussein Obama was down in the Sunshine State doing the same thing before an audience of dozens of Floridians.
As is Obama’s habit whenever campaigning in the South, he spent his entire speech trying like hell to sound like a southern black guy. Take a listen to the fake accent here:
https://dbdailyupdate.com/index.php/2018/11/03/trump-creates-the-most-am...
Just unbelievable, shameful pandering. But that’s our Barack!
A human dumpster fire walks into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, “What’ll it be, Alec Baldwin?” – Washed-up actor and horrible father Alec Baldwin was taken to jail in New York City yesterday. Again. How many times is this? Not sure. But he always gets off, presumably because of white privilege, or something.
Anyway, he got into a dispute with a guy over a parking spot, because, hey, we all know how tough it is to find parking in Manhattan, thanks to reruns of Seinfeld. The C-list actor had had a relative holding the spot for him as he prepared to back into it, but the victim pulled into the spot first. Baldwin, being the demented hot-head that he truly is, jumped out of his car and punched the guy as he was feeding the parking meter.
Hilarity ensued. No doubt the writers at Saturday Night Live have already come up with an extremely not-funny skit about it for tonight’s show, with Baldwin playing himself. Because that’s how our depraved entertainment industry works.
Just wait until we find out Christine Ford never met Brett Kavanaugh, either. – Judy Munro-Leighton, one of the women who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of being a rapist last month, has recanted her story and admitted she never even met the man. Guess she’s pissed that she didn’t get her own million-dollar GoFundMe account from the Democrats who planned the whole smear operation.
For her troubles, she does get her own personal criminal referral authored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, so she’s got that going for her. This was the third such referral Grassley has sent over to the Department of Justice in the last 10 days, and no one should think for a minute that he is done here. Every one of the women who accused Kavanaugh was lying, and if we ever get a real attorney general into office, they might all end up serving time in federal prisons.
Speaking of news the fake New York Times and CNN will ignore… – We had possibly the single most stunning jobs report in American history on Friday. Yes, the 250,000 new jobs was amazing; yes, the 3.7% rate of unemployment is fantastic; yes, the 3.1 real wage growth is terrific, the strongest in more than a decade. A new record 156,562,000 Americans employed? Almost unbelievable. Black unemployment? An all-time low. Hispanic unemployment? An all-time low. Female employment? An all-time high.
But the most amazing part of this amazing report? Not one, single, solitary industry in the United States of America suffered a net loss in jobs. Not one. Retail jobs? Up. Manufacturing jobs? Up. Mining jobs? Up. Industrial jobs? Up. On and on it went, throughout every single segment of the most diverse and massive economy in the history of civilization.
Barack Obama was happy to destroy U.S. manufacturing jobs and ship them overseas, telling Americans that they were old-style jobs that were never coming back. The Trump economy just created more than 1,000 new manufacturing jobs every DAY during October. Every DAY. This happened during a time in which all the “experts” predicted the Trump trade dispute with China would result in a net loss in manufacturing jobs. Oops. So much for “experts.”
Back in December, I wrote that the biggest economic problem our country would face in 2018 would be finding enough people to fill all the jobs that would result from the passage of the Trump tax cuts. Today, after this incredible jobs report, employers have more job openings than we have qualified applicants looking to fill them. I’m 62 years old – this has never happened in my lifetime.
Enjoy it while you can – next time we elect a Democrat to the presidency, it’ll all come to a crashing end.
That is all.
Update: Just found some stunning numbers I wanted to share with my readers, courtesy of GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel:
If President Obama actually wants to keep score:
In 8 years, Obama had a net loss of 192,000 manufacturing and 111,500 mining jobs.
In less than 2 years, @realDonaldTrump has created 416,000 manufacturing and 112,700 mining jobs.
Don't let Democrats stop this progress!
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) November 2, 2018
Vote Republican on Tuesday. This is the easiest decision we have ever had.
Right on cue, here comes the patheitic trolls clinging to Trump's 6,491 lies (and counting) -- the racists, the liars, and the fools desperate to defend the Republican/ Trump Party...
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The Thom Hartmann Program - 11/2/18
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OpEdNews - 1/8/2018 - From Alternet
"Time to Overthrow Our Rulers.
Is it time to bring a monarchy to the United States, or time to end one?"
By Thom Hartmann:
Is it time to bring a monarchy to the United States? Or is it time to end one?
The New York Times recently ran a fascinating article by Leslie Wayne putting forth arguments from the International Monarchist League. Summarizing them, Wayne wrote, "Their core arguments: Countries with monarchies are better off because royal families act as a unifying force and a powerful symbol; monarchies rise above politics; and nations with royalty are generally richer and more stable."
What the author misses is that we already have an aristocracy here in the United States: rule by the rich. In fact, much of American history is the story of the battle between the interests of the "general welfare" of our citizens, and the interests of the #MorbidlyRich.
Here's where we are right now:
It's been this way before in American history, though not in our lifetimes. The last time the morbidly rich had this much power in American politics was the 1920s, when an orgy of tax-cutting and deregulation of banking led to the Republican Great Depression.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped up to challenge those he called the Economic Royalists, explicitly calling them out. In 1936, FDR said:
"For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital -- all undreamed of by the Fathers -- the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
"There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit...
"It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself."
"They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.
"And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man."
Roosevelt, then the president of the United States, even explicitly called for the "overthrow of this kind of power":
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.
"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.
"In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for.
"Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike."
The American people overwhelmingly agreed with FDR, particularly after they'd seen how badly "dictatorship by the over-privileged" worked out for us in 1929. The result was that from 1932 until 1980 American politicians knew how important it was for government, representing the best interests of both our nation and all of its people, to hold back the political power that the morbidly rich could marshal with their great wealth.
This was such conventional wisdom in both parties that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar in 1956:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.
"There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
And business knew it, too. Big corporations and wealthy businesspeople largely stayed away from politics from the 1930s onward, not wanting to draw the ire of the American people.
Until 1971. In August of that year, Lewis Powell, a lawyer who largely defended tobacco and the interests of the Virginia's upper classes, wrote an apocalyptic memo to his neighbor and friend who was the head of the US Chamber of Commerce. In it, he suggested that America itself was under attack from "leftists" and people on "college campuses."
The solution, Powell proposed, was for a small group of very, very wealthy people to reshape American public opinion through think tanks, funding of universities and schools, and an all-out assault on the media. Take over the courts and at least one of the political parties, he suggested, and wrest control of our economy away from government regulation.
As I noted in The Crash of 2016:
Powell's most indelible mark on the nation was not to be his 15-year tenure as a Supreme Court Justice, but instead that memo, which served as a declaration of war -- a war by the Economic Royalists against both democracy and what they saw as an overgrown middle class. It would be a final war, a bellum omnium contra omnes, against everything the New Deal and the Great Society had accomplished.
It wasn't until September 1972, 10 months after the Senate confirmed Powell to the Supreme Court, that the public first found out about the Powell Memo (the actual written document had the word "Confidential" stamped on it -- a sign that Powell himself hoped it would never see daylight outside of the rarified circles of his rich friends). Although by then, however, it had already found its way to the desks of CEOs all across the nation and was, with millions in corporate and billionaire money, already being turned into real actions, policies, and institutions.
During its investigation into Powell as part of the nomination process, the FBI never found the memo, but investigative journalist Jack Anderson did, and he exposed it in a September 28th, 1972, column titled, "Powell's Lesson to Business Aired."
Anderson wrote, "Shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. urged business leaders in a confidential memo to use the courts as a 'social, economic, and political' instrument."
Pointing out that how the memo wasn't discovered until after Powell was confirmed by the Senate, Anderson wrote, "Senators...never got a chance to ask Powell whether he might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice and to influence the court in behalf of business interests."
This was an explosive charge being leveled at the nation's rookie Supreme Court Justice, a man entrusted with interpreting the nation's laws with complete impartiality.
But Jack Anderson was no stranger to taking on American authority, and no stranger to the consequences of his journalism. He'd exposed scandals from the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and later the Reagan administrations. He was a true investigative journalist.
In his report on the memo, Anderson wrote, "[Powell] recommended a militant political action program, ranging from the courts to the campuses."
Back in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt had declared war on his generation's Economic Royalists and booted the worst of them out of the nation's political, economic, and cultural institutions. But now, two generations later, Lewis Powell was speaking of another war.
Powell's memo was both a direct response to Roosevelt's battle cry decades earlier, and a response to the tumult of the 1960's.
He wrote, "No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack."
When Sydnor and the Chamber received the Powell Memo, corporations were growing tired of their second-class status in America.
Even though the previous 40 years had been a time of great growth and strength for the American economy and America's middle-class workers -- and a time of sure and steady growth and increases of profits for corporations -- CEOs felt something was missing.
If only they could find a way to wiggle back into the people's minds (who were just beginning to forget the Royalists' previous exploits of the 1920s), then they could get their tax cuts back; they could trash the "burdensome" regulations that were keeping the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat safe; and the banksters among them could inflate another massive economic bubble to make themselves all mind-bogglingly rich. It could, if done right, be a return to the "Roaring 20s."
But how could they do this? How could they convince Americans to take another shot at what was widely considered a dangerous free-market ideology and economic framework and that Americans once knew preceded each Great Crash and war?
Lewis Powell had an answer, and he reached out to the Chamber of Commerce -- the hub of corporate power in America -- to lay out a strategy to reclaim their power with a strategy.
As Powell wrote, "Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations." Thus, Powell said, "The role of the National Chamber of Commerce is therefore vital."
In the nearly-6,000-word memo, Powell called on corporate leaders to launch an economic and ideological assault on college and high school campuses, the media, the courts, and Capitol Hill.
The objective was simple: The revival of a Royalist-controlled so-called "free market" system.
Or, as Powell put it, using Royalist rhetoric, "[T]he ultimate issue...[is the] survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people."
The first area of attack Powell encouraged the Chamber to focus on was the education system. "[A] priority task of business -- and organizations such as the Chamber -- is to address the campus origin of this hostility [to big business]," Powell wrote.
What worried Powell was the new generation of young Americans growing up to resent corporate culture. He believed colleges were filled with "Marxist professors," and that the pro-business agenda of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had fallen into disrepute since the Great Depression. He knew that winning this war of economic ideology in America required spoon-feeding the next generation of leaders the doctrines of a free-market theology, from high school all the way through graduate and business school.
At the time, college campuses were rallying points for the progressive activism sweeping the nation, as young people demonstrated against poverty, the Vietnam War, and in support of Civil Rights.
So Powell put forward a laundry list of ways the Chamber could re-retake the higher-education system. First, create an army of corporate-friendly think tanks that could influence education. "The Chamber should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system," he wrote.
Then, go after the textbooks. "The staff of scholars," Powell wrote, "should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology...This would include assurance of fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system, its accomplishments, its basic relationship to individual rights and freedoms, and comparisons with the systems of socialism, fascism and communism."
Powell argued that the Civil Rights movement and the Labor movement were already in the process of re-rewriting textbooks.
"We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor." Powell was concerned the Chamber of Commerce was not doing enough to stop this growing progressive influence and replace it with a pro-plutocratic perspective.
"Perhaps the most fundamental problem is the imbalance of many faculties," Powell pointed out. "Correcting this is indeed a long-range and difficult project. Yet, it should be undertaken as a part of an overall program. This would mean the urging of the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees." As in, the Chamber needs to infiltrate university boards in charge of hiring faculty to make sure only corporate-friendly professors are hired.
But Powell's recommendations weren't exclusive to college campuses; he targeted high schools as well.
"While the first priority should be at the college level, the trends mentioned above are increasingly evidenced in the high schools. Action programs, tailored to the high schools and similar to those mentioned, should be considered," he urged.
Next, Powell turned the corporate dogs on the media. As Powell instructed, "Reaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term. Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term."
Powell added, "It will...be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public."
He then went on to advocate that same system used for the monitoring of college textbooks be applied to television and radio networks. "This applies not merely to so-called educational programs...but to the daily 'news analysis' which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system."
This was not, of course, the first time that American oligarchs and their supplicants plotted to subvert American democracy in favor of a harsh capitalist-controlled "free enterprise" system that handed virtually all the spoils of business over to a wealthy few.
In the early 1880s, railroad barons funded six major attempts at the US Supreme Court to create, from the 14th Amendment, a "right of corporate personhood." In 1886, although the Court rejected their theory for the last and final time, the Clerk of the Court, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, inserted into the not-legally-binding headnote of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case that the Chief Justice had, offhandedly, certified corporate personhood.
Reacting to that and the general rise of the men then called robber barons, Democratic President Grover Cleveland, in his 1888 State of the Union address, said:
"The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.
"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.
"Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."
From President Cleveland's comments, you can draw a straight line to the trust busting and inheritance tax of progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt in the first decade of the 20th century.
But the oligarchs fought back and, in the election of 1920, regained the power to cut taxes and regulations sufficiently that the rich got explosively richer, while the entire economy was set up for the Great Crash. (Warren Harding ran for president with two slogans -- "More business in government, less government in business" [privatize and deregulate], and cutting the top tax rate from 90% to 25%...both of which he did.)
And Lewis Powell's contribution to today's problems is easily found in the 1976 Buckley v Valeo decision, which struck down many of the campaign finance laws that had been passed in the wake of the Nixon scandals. Money transferred from billionaires to politicians, he and his conservative friends on the court ruled, wasn't "money" -- instead, it was Constitutionally-protected First Amendment Free Speech.
Just in time for the Reagan Revolution, the morbidly rich could again own individual politicians, and with the 2013 McCutcheon case, the Court ruled that morbidly rich individuals could own a virtually unlimited number of politicians. Citizens United, in 2010, radically expanded corporate personhood and the rights of billionaires and corporations to influence politics.
Thus, here we are again.
We have a billionaire oligarch in the White House.
We have a man as VP who's such a toady to oligarchs he actually promoted the idea in 2000 that tobacco doesn't cause cancer, and today denies climate science on behalf of the petrobillionaires who have funded much of his political career.
We have an entire Republican Party that's been captured by toxic-emissions corporations, petro-billionaires, and others among the morbidly rich. On the left, thanks to the DLC and its heirs, substantial parts of the Democratic Party are beholden to the banking, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries (although the Congressional Progressive Caucus is working to change this).
The Washington Post recently ran an article about how the very institutions of America are beginning to break down under the sustained assault of the oligarchs (although the Post doesn't use that word). The main point of the article is that Donald Trump actually believes that both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, committed major crimes, and that the attorney general and others in the Department of Justice covered up those crimes.
Where did Trump get such a wild idea? It seems certain that he got it from billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. And because he actually believes that previous presidents got away with committing major crimes both to win elections and to stay in office, he apparently thinks he should be able to as well.
It's perhaps amusing to well-informed Americans when their friends and relatives spout the billionaire-enabling propaganda that Fox dishes out every day. But there's nothing amusing about a president of the United States believing, based on what he learns in right-wing media, that he can easily get away with breaking the law. This is the result of the billionaire capture of our public spaces, driving a "profits over democracy" mentality.
To save our republic, we must acknowledge that the American aristocracy of the morbidly rich is destroying our country. And then overturn (via constitutional amendment) the twin policies of right-wingers on our Supreme Court that say that billionaires can own their own personal politicians, and that corporations are "persons" with human rights.
Once we reject America's new self-appointed royalty, with their billionaire and corporate money fouling our system, our elected officials can restore protections for working people -- and we can once again see our wages begin to rise like they did for 40 straight years before the advent of Reaganism.
Only then can we bring back rules to keep the oligarch's poisonous money out of our political system, and begin to break up their control of American business and media so that small- and medium-sized businesses, unions, and local media can once again thrive. And, with them, we can return to something resembling a democracy.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Time-to-Overthrow-Our-Rule-by-Thom-Hartmann-Aristocracy_Corporations_Money_Politics-180108-611.html
Thom Hartmann quotes - from Goodreads (Fair Use)
“Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it”
― Thom Hartmann
“Master Stanley used to tell me that what I was doing was nowhere near as important as the place within myself from where I was doing it. For example, a person could be teaching others out of a selfless motive, or out of a desire for power or glory: the former had a positive impact on the world, whereas the latter had a negative impact, even though the same identical teaching may have been imparted. “It’s the spirit that’s important,” he would say. “It’s even more important than the act. Going to work in a gas station and providing for your family out of love is more important than creating a mighty religious work out of a desire for glory or power.” ― Thom Hartmann, The Prophet's Way: A Guide to Living in the Now
“And so we see people who are spiritually disconnected, living in boxes and driving in boxes, perhaps once a year going "out to nature" to get a small touch of what was once the daily experience of humans. These people seek escape. They sit in urban and suburban homes and feel miserable, not knowing why, experiencing anxiety and fear and pain that cannot be softened by drugs or TV or therapy because they are afflicted with a sickness of the soul, not of the mind.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late
“Many people today think that the Tea Act—which led to the Boston Tea Party—was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by the American colonists. That's where the whole "Taxation Without Representation" meme came from.
Instead, the purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade and to exempt the company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea that it was unable to sell and holding in inventory.
In other words, the Tea Act was the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
“It’s ironic that the Tea Party populists, most of whom believe that they are furthering the American ideal of “rugged individualism,” are supporting mega-corporate-friendly policies like Reaganomics and Clintonomics and are making it very difficult for individuals to be anything other than drones in a giant corporate-run economic machine. And, on the flipside, those countries that call themselves “democratic socialist” in their organization—Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden—actually provide a deep and fertile soil into which entrepreneurs may plant new businesses.”
― Thom Hartmann, Rebooting the American Dream
“Both Jefferson and Adams were wary of priests in all forms, as they both knew theocracies are enemies of democracy. Jefferson pointed out that the Indians shared their wariness:”
― Thom Hartmann, What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy
“The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“An important book for understanding the history of our economic boom & bust cycles. It's an eye-opening account of how we are repeating the mistakes of the 1760's, 1850's, and 1920's. The author is a brilliant writer and is so good at explaining even the most complex subjects in a compelling & easy to understand way. The next crash will be painful but it's important to understand what is being done to us, and how we can learn from history and take action.”
― Thom Hartmann
“June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Bankers’ ” noted, “The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths.”107”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
“the Occupy Movement flared up and began setting up tents in public parks all around the nation, from New York City to Chicago to Seattle. But it actually happened exactly eighty years earlier, when the nation was drowning in President Hoover’s Great Depression, and not President Bush’s Great Recession. These settlements weren’t called “occupations” at the time, they were called “Hoovervilles.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
“So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“There is more carbon in the atmosphere trapping heat and moisture than ever before in the 165,000 years of human history.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation. Yet over the past century—and particularly the past forty years—corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, “persons” and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it’s perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It“His concern was that if there were a few rights specified in the Constitution, future generations may forget that those are just examples and that the Constitution itself protects all human rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“Corporations haven’t limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“Other corporations have asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as well as asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment—passed after the Civil War to strip slavery from the Constitution—protects their right “against discrimination” by a local community that doesn’t want them building a toxic waste incinerator, commercial hog operation, or superstore.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“I hold it to be impracticable”4 to try to define it or any right narrowly in a Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn’t say that corporations are people. The U.S. Constitution wasn’t written with that idea; corporations aren’t mentioned anywhere in the document or its Amendments. For America’s first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, “No, corporations do not have the same rights as humans.” In fact, the Founders were quite clear (as you can see from Hamilton’s debate earlier) that only humans inherently have rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it’s in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit “new” rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“since 1886, the Bill of Rights has been explicitly applied to corporations. Perhaps most astoundingly, no branch of the U.S. government ever formally enacted corporate personhood “rights”: • The public never voted on it. • It was never enacted into law by any legislature. • It was never even stated by a decision after arguments before the Supreme Court.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“for one hundred years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did in fact conclude that “corporations are persons.” But this book will show that the Court never stated this: it was added by the court reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, a commentary called a headnote.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child“We are literally releasing the carbon dioxide that nature had locked up over a hundred million [years] down below the Earth. And we’re releasing all that carbon dioxide now at a rate a million times faster [than it accumulated].”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we’re causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them.
Which is exactly what happened.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
“The clause that grants all “persons” equal protection under the law, in context, seems to apply pretty clearly only to human beings “born or naturalized” in the United States of America. But fate and time and the conspiracies of great wealth and power often have a way of turning common sense and logic on its head,”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“in previous decades a chemical company took to the Supreme Court a case asserting its Fourth Amendment “right to privacy” from the Environmental Protection Agency’s snooping into its illegal chemical discharges.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“If this trend continues, it’s probably just a matter of time before a corporation (maybe one of the many mercenary forces that emerged out of George W. Bush’s Iraq War?) claims the Second Amendment right to bear arms anywhere, anytime, and your credit card company’s bill collector shows up at your home with a sidearm.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“Humans are born with human rights. Those human rights are inherent—”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights“nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn’t even include in the Constitution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“And those rights are not to be lightly infringed upon by government in any way. They’re explicitly protected by the Constitution from the government. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights“Breaking Big Money's Grip on America is "a brilliant analysis of where we are and where we need to go. Read this book.”
― Thom Hartmann
“The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].”They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it.And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing?The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states.Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional.President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional.The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
“We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people—representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy—the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich,” Moyers”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy.
After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich....
As Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter...a totally "free" market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive governments of old, could transform America 'until the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
“There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are: Define the issue. Bring up the story. Walk with the issue. Notice how the issue changes. Anchor the new state.”
― Thom Hartmann, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being
“As [President Thomas] Jefferson realized, with no government interference by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there could be no broad middle class—maybe a sliver of small businesses and artisans, but the vast majority of us would be the working poor under the yolk [sic] of elites. The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy. After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich.... the Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights.” ― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“among men and not among angels; among men as intelligent, as determined and as independent as myself, who, not agreeing with me, do not choose to yield up their opinions to mine. Mutual concessions is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”*” ― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights “There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are: Define the issue. Bring up the story. Walk with the issue. Notice how the issue changes. Anchor the new state.”
― Thom Hartmann, Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being
“generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. [It] says what the states can’t do to you. [It] says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“The Constitution doesn’t give us rights: it restrains government from infringing on rights we acquire at birth by virtue of being human beings, “natural rights” that are held “The year Reagan was sworn into office, 1981, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. ... Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world's mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world's largest importer of finished, manufactured goods.This has resulted in an enormous trade imbalance, one that has grown from a modest $15 billion deficit in 1981 to an enormous $539 billion deficit by 2012.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It
“It’s estimated that the Arctic, within seven years and maybe as soon as 2015, will have its first ice-free summer in the last 700,000 years (keep in mind that humans have only been on this planet for 165,000 years). Earlier projections predicted ice-free summers as far out in the future as 2080.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“natural persons.” The Constitution holds back (restraining government) rather than gives forward (granting rights to people).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
“Dickens knew there were vast reserves of methane hydrate trapped frozen in sea-beds all around the world and wondered what would happen if a lot of that frozen methane on the sea floor had melted from a solid into a gas, and bubbled up from the ocean’s depths? Would it be enough to account for the “signature” of carbon-12 that geologists were finding in the rocks associated with the Permian Mass Extinction? So he went back to the lab and melted frozen methane in water warm enough. The results were dramatic. The gas not only dissolved into the water, but it also rose up out of the water and into the air. Dickens published a paper in 1999 suggesting that a 5 degree Celsius increase in ocean temperatures would have been adequate to melt enough methane hydrate crystals to create the Permian carbon-12 signature. And such a massive release of methane, itself a greenhouse gas vastly more potent than CO2, would also trigger a catastrophic, swift warming of the planet.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don’t even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“Most Americans — 78% to be exact — drive fewer than 40 miles per day. Which means that for more than three-quarters of us, we really don’t need gasoline at all. Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don’t even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction
“In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped.Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him.
Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries.”
― Thom Hartmann
“as the consequences of global warming further manifest themselves, political will for a hard cap will undoubtedly build, just like it did with sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain in the 1980s. It’s rarely discussed in the press, but President George Herbert Walker Bush successfully pushed through a cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide which radically reduced acid rain.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinctionhttps://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1433.Thom_Hartmann?page=1
The Democrats are on fire, so lather up...
Óinseach, the master of inconsequential insinuation, transparent deflection, and sophomoric obfuscation, who supports a deranged racist, sexist, religious bigot, homophobe, war monger, Wall Street patsy, Putin poodle, serial liar, vindictive child, and all around facking eejit, by whom the world's sane people are utterly disgusted.
DianeR,
Look at the desperate Dems! I think I found the KKK.....
The New York City Police Department arrested a Democratic activist on Friday night for allegedly vandalizing a synagogue in New York City with vile anti-Semitic messages. This comes just days after 11 people were murdered at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
Authorities arrested 26-year-old James Polite, a former volunteer on Obama's first presidential campaign, for allegedly vandalizing Brooklyn’s Union Temple on Thursday with anti-Semitic messages that included "die Jew rats we are here," "Jews better be ready," and "Hitler."
https://www.dailywire.com/news/37946/obama-volunteer-arrested-vandalizin...
Plus...
https://www.dcclothesline.com/2018/11/03/see-proof-that-democrats-are-now-the-party-of-mass-mental-illness/
And
https://imgur.com/gallery/E443Ka3
HotCoffee, it IS Bloody Mary Sunday including pickle and olives.
Here is one you will not see in any of the liberal news or hear about on any leftie/socialist talking radio bobbleheads.
"South Carolina mom-of-three Ashley Jones jumped into action Thursday morning after she heard a man banging on her door.
"Surveillance footage shows a man knocking loudly on Jones’ door, while a woman paces behind him. Jones said she grabbed her gun and called 911 before looking out the window to see what the commotion was about.
I yelled, 'I have a gun, I will shoot you, get away from my house,'” Jones told FOX Carolina.
The man then kicked in her door, at which point Jones shot him."
One more funny just for the heck of it.
'No evidence' to back Kavanaugh accusers' claims, Senate panel's report on FBI probe finds
Loved the leftie/socialists crying over this. Maybe they have figured out Kavanaugh will have a very long memory.
Time to start shaking up the ZingZang Bloody Mary mix and opening the stuffed olives.
Later,
And here come the racists, the liars, and the fools desperate to defend the Republican/ Trump Party...
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The Thom Hartmann Program - 11/2/18
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Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights
by Thom Hartmann
Discover more about "Unequal Protection"
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Excerpt from Unequal Protection : Reclaiming the Global Dream
Is Democracy Still Possible in America and the World?
All constitutions, those of the States no less than that of the nation, are designed, and must be interpreted and administered so as to fit human rights.
-Theodore Roosevelt, Feb 12, 1912 speech
Thomas Paine said it best.
"It has been thought," he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, "...that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."
Every culture and every religion of what we call the civilized world carries, in one form or another, a mythos or story about a time in the past or future when humans lived or will live in peace and harmony. Whether it's referred to as Valhalla or Eden, Shambala or "A Thousand Years of Peace," the Satya Yuga or Jannat, stories of past or coming times of paradise go hand-in-hand with hierarchical cultures.
Such prophecies were clearly in the minds of America's Founders when they first discussed integrating Greek ideas of democracy, Roman notions of a republic, Masonic utopian ideals, and the Iroquois Federation's constitutionally organized egalitarian society, which was known to Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Franklin. The creation of the United States of America brought into the world a dramatic new experiment in how people could live together in a modern state.
While most of the rest of the world watched this new experimental democracy with skepticism, the citizens of France took our revolution to heart and initiated the French revolution just six years after ours ended.
America grew swiftly and steadily for nearly a century, and many other countries of the world began to experiment with their own versions of democracy. As America was convulsed by the Civil War, the world held its breath, but America remained intact and the period of industrialization following the war led to one of the most rapid periods of worldwide growth in history.
This growth cemented for the world the concept of the American ideal, as millions escaped their homelands to settle in the new "land of opportunity and freedom."
American democracy is the model for the Global Dream
Thus, America has come to represent the world's archetypal concept of freedom and egalitarianism.
On May 29th, 1989, over one-and-a-half million people gathered around a 37-foot-tall statue in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. They placed their lives in danger, but that statue was such a powerful archetypal representation that many were willing to die for it'and some did.
They called their statue the "Goddess of Democracy": it was a scale replica of the Statue of Liberty that stands in New York harbor on Liberty Island.
From the French Revolution in 1789 to the people's uprising in Beijing in 1989, people around the world have used language and icons borrowed from the pen of Thomas Jefferson and his peers. Even if we didn't implement it fully in our early efforts, and even if it's been strained since its inception, the Greek-Roman-Masonic-Iroquois-American idea of a government "deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed" is probably one of the most powerful and timeless ideas in the world today. It is the Global Dream.
While there are pockets of those in the world who hate us and even foist terrorist acts upon us, there are billions more who desperately wish to embrace the principles upon which our nation was founded. We in the United States of America hold a sacred archetype for the world: the Dream of freedom and individual liberty.
Can we reclaim the Global Dream in the land of its birth?
Yes:
In the last century, a citizen-led effort resulted in passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote - despite long tradition and past Court decisions
Similar efforts led to constitutional amendments banning, and then rescinding the ban on, alcohol.
Most recently, the 26th amendment lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 was ratified, in part in response to demands from servicemen and women in Vietnam and veterans of that war. And a popular protest song, The Eve of Destruction, was a prominent voice for this popular sentiment, saying: "You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'."
In each of these cases, citizens spoke out and the Constitution was changed.
Today, a growing movement has begun in the United States to bring back the Global Dream, restoring human personhood to its rightful place at the top of the priority sheet. For example, on April 25, 2000, the city of Point Arena, California passed a "City Council Resolution On Corporate Personhood" "rejecting the notion of corporate personhood" in which they "urge other cities to foster similar public discussion" on the issue.
Restoring Jefferson's dream
The dream of egalitarian democracy in America was taken captive, but it lives on.
Today the captivity is so obvious that as the 21st Century began, people protested in Seattle and Genoa, facing police beatings to register their hope that the Dream be reawakened. They faced risks similar to those faced by the Americans who stood up against tyranny at the Boston Tea Party.
Presidents warned us, and the railroads fought their restrictions for decades. The Dream was finally, formally stolen in 1886, as we've seen in this book. When US Supreme Court Reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote that Chief Justice Waite had said, "Corporations are persons," and courts read his headnotes as if they were a Supreme Court ruling, the course of world history was changed.
It seems especially ironic that the whole premise of the founding of this country was "all Men are created equal," and companies have sought protection on that premise, yet in reality the words of William Jennings Bryan are far more accurate: men are indeed fairly equivalent, but a company can be a million times more powerful.
Equal protection was designed to protect the disenfranchised, not to further empower the mighty. We can right the wrong; we can balance the scales; we can write new laws. We can restore the intent of the constitution's authors, by declaring that these protections apply to natural persons, and in so doing, begin the process of restoring and reinvigorating the world's democracies.
Discover more about "Unequal Protection"